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Weighing Life in Prison for Youths Who Didn’t Kill

TALLAHASSEE, Fla.
-- There are just over 100 people in the world serving sentences of
life without the possibility of parole for crimes they committed as
juveniles in which no one was killed. All are in the United States.
And 77 of them are here in Florida.

On Monday, the Supreme
Court will hear appeals from two such juvenile offenders: Joe Sullivan,
who raped a woman when he was 13, and Terrance Graham, who committed
armed burglary at 16. They claim that
the Eighth Amendment's ban on cruel and unusual punishment forbids sentencing
them to die in prison for crimes other than homicide.

Outside the context
of the death penalty, the Supreme Court has generally allowed states
to decide for themselves what punishments fit what crimes. But the court barred
the execution of juvenile offenders in 2005 by a vote of 5 to 4, saying
that people under 18 are immature, irresponsible, susceptible to peer
pressure and often capable of change.

A ruling extending
that reasoning beyond capital cases “could be the Brown v. Board of
Education of juvenile law,” said Paolo G. Annino, the director of
the Children's Advocacy Clinic at Florida State University's law school.
Judges, legislators and prosecutors in Florida agree that the state
takes an exceptionally tough line on juvenile crime.

“Sometimes a 15-year-old
has a tremendous appreciation for right and wrong,” said State Representative William D. Snyder, a Republican who is chairman of the House's Criminal and Civil Justice
Policy Council. “I think it would be wrong for the Supreme Court to
say that it was patently illegal or improper to send a youthful offender
to life without parole. At a certain point, juveniles cross the line,
and they have to be treated as adults and punished as adults.”

A retired Florida appeals
court judge, John R. Blue, did not see it that way. “To lock them
up forever seems a little barbaric to me,” Judge
Blue said. “It just seems to me that if you are going to put someone
who is 13 or 14 or 15 or 16 or 17 into prison, you ought to leave them
some hope.”

Several factors in
combination -- some legal, some historical, some cultural -- help account
for the disproportionate number of juvenile lifers in Florida.

The state's attorney
general, Bill McCollum, explained the roots of the state's approach
in the first paragraph of his brief in Mr. Graham's case.

“By the 1990s, violent
juvenile crime rates had reached unprecedented high levels throughout
the nation,” Mr. McCollum wrote. “Florida's problem was particularly
dire, compromising the safety of residents, visitors and international
tourists, and threatening the state's bedrock tourism industry.” Nine
foreign tourists were killed over 11 months in 1992 and 1993, one of
them by a 14-year-old.

Mr. Snyder, the state
legislator, put it this way: “Instead of the Sunshine State, it was
the Gun-shine State.”

In response, the state
moved more juveniles into adult courts, increased sentences and eliminated
parole for capital crimes.

Thomas K. Petersen,
a semi-retired judge in Miami who spent a decade hearing cases in juvenile
court, said that the state's reaction was out of proportion to the problem
and that it has lately failed to take account of changed circumstances.

“Back in the 1990s,
there were dire predictions about teenage super-predators, particularly
in Florida,” Judge Petersen said. “Florida, probably more than other
places because of that rash of crimes, overreacted. It was a hysterical
reaction.”

“People still go
around saying things have never been worse,” he added. “But violent
juvenile crime has gone down even as the juvenile population has grown.”

The state's brief in
Mr. Graham's case said juvenile crime fell 30 percent in the decade
ended in 2004. It attributed the drop to its tough approach to the problem.

“We were pretty
aggressive in those years in transferring kids into criminal court,”
Mr. Bilchik said. “There was a feeling that we needed to protect our
streets.”

He said later research
convinced him that his office's approach was much too aggressive and
had not served to deter crime.

“My biggest regret,”
Mr. Bilchik said, “is that during the time I was in the prosecutor's
office, we were under the false impression that we were insuring greater
public safety when we were not.”

Mr. Sullivan, now 34,
had committed a string of crimes by the time he was charged with raping a 72-year-old woman after a burglary
in 1989 in Pensacola. Mr. Graham, now 22, was sentenced to a year in
jail and three years of probation for a 2003 robbery of a barbecue restaurant
in Jacksonville, during which an accomplice beat the manager with a
steel bar. Mr. Graham was sentenced to life in 2005 for violating his
probation by committing a home invasion robbery with two others
when he was 17.

Concern about tourism
continues to drive crime policy in the state, said Kathleen M. Heide,
a professor of criminology at the University of South Florida. “We're
at the more extreme level,” she said, “because our economy is so
tied up with people coming here on vacation and feeling safe. And older
people want to live out their retirements here and be safe.”

There are, according
to a brief filed in the cases by human rights groups and foreign bar associations,
more than 2,500 juvenile offenders in the United States serving sentences
of life without the possibility of parole, mostly for murder. This country
is alone, the brief said, in imposing the punishment for juvenile offenses.
(The maximum sentence in Germany, for instance, for any crime committed
by a juvenile is 10 years. In Italy, it is 24 years.)

Florida is one of eight
states with juvenile offenders serving life sentences without the possibility
of parole for nonhomicide crimes, according to a prepared by Professor Annino and two colleagues
at Florida State. Louisiana has 17 such prisoners; California, Delaware,
Iowa, Mississippi, Nebraska and South Carolina have the rest.

The number of such
sentences in Florida was greater in the decade that ended
in 2008 than in the decade before. The state sentenced nine juvenile
offenders for nonhomicide crimes to life without parole in 2005 alone.

“We're just so far
out from everyone else,” Professor Annino said. “These are 77 children
who didn't kill anyone. We're unique, and we're out of step with the
rest of the country.”

Mr. Snyder, the state
legislator, said finding the right balance in addressing juvenile crime
was difficult but should be left to the states.

“People do things
at 16 and 17 that they wouldn't do at 37, but they spend a lifetime
paying for it,” he said. “But we have to create an environment where
our children are safe and our elderly are safe.”

A version of this article appears in print on November 8, 2009, on page A24 of the New York edition with the headline: Supreme Court Set to Hear Appeals on Life in Prison for Youths Who Never Killed. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe